Random blog posts about research in political communication, how people learn or don't learn from the media, why it all matters -- plus other stuff that interests me. It's my blog, after all. I can do what I want.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Trump is Ford, Clinton is Honda?

So this survey breaks it down by candidate support and make/model of vehicles owned. I got there via this Daily Caller story (yes, I sometimes read it, please don't tell anyone). Essentially, Trump supporters drive American. Clinton supporters drive those other cars and *shudder* Prius. That's the message here, for what little it's worth.

For the record, I drive a Ford.

So what do we know about the methodology? Is this a real poll? It's hard to say. Here's what they report (graphic below), with the yellow circle added by me to point out the details. It's heavy on men by about six percentage points, and we have no idea whether the "all 50 states" were representative of the states or weighted more heavily than they should be of certain, less populous states. All it says in the tiny type below is they "surveyed" folks, nothing about how they did it, whether it was random, or what. They report a margin of error, but that only works if you have a random survey.